by Yiyang Wen
The fundamental reason people want to catalogue and preserve heritage derives from modernists’ anxieties for the loss of the past, while ironically the loss of the past until recently is still the basic feature of the present. This implicates an ideal expectation that catalogue can traverse time and space to record object in its full details. However, this wish fails because nothing can spatiotemporally persist. This tension, to my perspective, endows contemporary cataloguing with three controversial features.
First, cataloguing is never neutral because objects are described differently through different times and spaces. As some scholars suggest, object preservations and cataloguing are always under certain socioeconomic environments that implicate dominantly political schema. Cataloguers, even if being told to be “neutral and fair”, can never achieve that idea because they live in this politicised world. For example, previous British cataloguers interpret objects from Maqdala, Ethiopia as “looted treasures” while contemporary ones are more drawing on objects’ provenance and traditional aspects. Here, catalogues from different times have very different explanations about the same collection.
Second, cataloguing inherits personal traits from corresponding cataloguers. This is to say, “who to catalogue what?” is a core question embedded in contemporary cataloguing world. An example in digital catalogues can better explain this. While previous cataloguers considered their data as valuable and accessible, later cataloguers who needed to transit all information from physical paperwork to digital database would treat some seemingly redundant labels and descriptions as “dirty data” that should be cut off. This situation is prominent because we can imagine how much data has been manually omitted by certain righteous reasons from cataloguers at that time.
Third, cataloguing is a way to dominate rights to access and interpret knowledge. In other words, objects are described by those who are eligible to describe them. This shows a sheer unbalanced power relation between the dominant and the underprivileged. To the best, cataloguers can “collaborate” with indigenous people on object interpretations, while to the worst, cataloguers exert “violence” on object alone that detach it from its ethnographic backgrounds. Watkins and the Black Bottom Archive did a great job in “collaboration”, in that they engaged with Black Detroit Community and tried to explore personal histories that were related to their archival objects.
In addition to these three basic features and corresponding problems, the rise of digital cataloguing also brings two difficulties. For one, for the sake of fast searching database, digital catalogue is seemingly monopolising knowledge, especially those key words from only cataloguer sides to describe objects; for another, the transition from physical documents to digital catalogues inconveniently requires cataloguers to have professions in both areas, because they need to understand why some information is important while others are not.
Reference
Arizpe, L. and Amescua, C. (eds) (2013) Anthropological Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage. Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing (SpringerBriefs in Environment, Security, Development and Peace). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00855-4.
Brulon Soares, B. and Witcomb, A. (2022) ‘Editorial: Towards Decolonisation’, Museum International, 74(3–4), p. 1. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13500775.2022.2234187.
Prosper, S. (2024) ‘A failure of care: unsettling traditional archival practices’, in C. Krmpotich and A. Stevenson (eds) Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice. UCL Press, pp. 35–48. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.19551243.7.
Turner, H. (2020) ‘Object, Specimen, Data: Computerization and the Legacy of Dirty Data’, in Cataloguing Culture. University of British Columbia Press, pp. 157–183. Available at: https://doi.org/10.59962/9780774863940-009.